However, following the Second Sudanese Civil War (1983–2005) and the now-low-scale war in Darfur, Sudan is widely recognized as an authoritarianstate where all effective political power is obtained by President Omar al-Bashir and the ruling National Congress Party (NCP). The political system of the country was restructured following a military coup on 30 June 1989, when al-Bashir, then a colonel in the Sudanese Army, led a group of officers and ousted the government of Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi. Under al-Bashir’s leadership, the new military government suspended political parties and introduced an Islamic legal code on the national level.[29]

According to the new 2005 constitution, the bicameral National Legislature is the official Sudanese parliament and is divided between two chambers — the National Assembly, a lower house with 450 seats, and the Council of States, an upper house with 50 seats. Thus the parliament consists of 500 appointed members altogether, where all are indirectly elected by state legislatures to serve six-year terms.[9]

Despite his international arrest warrant, al-Bashir was a candidate in the 2010 Sudanese presidential election, the first democratic election with multiple political parties participating in twenty-four years.[86] In the build-up to the vote, Sudanese pro-democracy activists say they faced intimidation by the government[87] and the International Crisis Group reported that the ruling party hadgerrymandered electoral districts.[88] A few days before the vote, the main opposition candidate, Yasir Arman from the SPLM, withdrew from the race.[89] The U.S.-based Carter Center, which helped monitor the elections, described the vote tabulation process as “highly chaotic, non-transparent and vulnerable to electoral manipulation.”[90] Al-Bashir was declared the winner of the election with sixty-eight percent of the vote.[86] There was considerable concern amongst the international community of a return to violence in the run-up to the January 2011 southern Sudan referendum, with post-referendum issues such as oil-revenue sharing and border demarcation not yet resolved.[91]